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Comment by keerthiko | Hacker News Reader

3 things made me drop Atom:

1. The slow startup time in question

2. The huge editor software file size. I am not leaving 400mb for "yet another text editor"

3. I had become very dependent on some Sublime plugins for my work and the Atom counterparts were a long ways off being up to par.

The thing that first made me excited about atom was that being built around Chromium I thought we could finally have an editor with a nice Chrome-like web view with real-time update built into it, as a tab or something.

However, I noticed a thread on it in Atom (can't find it now), and it sounded like the core of Atom's security prevented such a thing from ever being built, so it would remain an unfulfilled desire. Oh well.

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Not only the start up time, it seems to hog memory and bog down my Macbook Air (4GB) after using it for awhile. I'm not entirely sure if it was the length of time I had Atom open or the size of the project. I usually have Chrome running with a small Vagrant box. After a few hours it was unbearably slow to even switch between open files.

I closed Atom and my memory pressure dropped considerably. Installed Brackets and the pressure is still low even with Chrome and a box running yet.

This probably isn't an issue for people with 8+ GB of ram though, unless it actually has a memory leak.

Well duh, it's built on web technologies. These are probably the most bloated, inefficient, and memory-hogging things humanity has built on a computer to date.

Honestly, nobody who adopted Atom should ever be surprised by any single aspect of its sluggishness.

Installing Brackets is probably the best thing I've ever done in my entire web programming career.

    > 2. The huge editor software file size. I am not leaving 
    > 400mb for "yet another text editor"

I don't know why you'd care about this, besides reasons of dogmatic principle. Disk is the cheapest thing in the world. Any benefit that can be had at the cost of larger artifact size, especially for things like consumer applications, should be taken, IMO.

It adds up. More and more applications are that fat. My system drive is 1 TB, and I am a point in which I need to judge which application is worthy of taking space. I agree that 400 MB for an editor is a tad too much.

400 MB costs less than 2 cents. Is it really worth your time and energy to worry about disk space when you could double the space on your machine for $50?

Space is expensive if you are using an SSD.

And what if we're talking about, say, a proprietary SSD, which is replaceable but you lose your warranty?

Apple's Macbook SSD upgrades are quite a bit more expensive than you're positing.

Theoretically, space is cheap. But space is precious on a 128gb ssd macbook air.

I am pretty economical with space, I don't store media on here, it's almost entirely dev tools and code projects. And I do not want a piece of software that takes 400mb without providing me significantly more value than what my 30mb (Sublime Text) one. I don't care about media being large, or backups taking a lot of space, or installers being big, since I can shove those on an external.

But I'm obviously not going to do that with any dev tools. Any tool that cannot justify it's size cannot live on my internal drive, and if it ain't there I'm not using it.

Yeah, the size was staggering. And prebuilt packages for one platform (now two)? Haven't even tried it...

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